Jeonju Digital Project 2011: Straub/Denis/Guerín

Each year the Jeonju International Film Festival commissions three short works by leading world filmmakers. The 2011 selection features contributions by three masters of modern European cinema.

Jean-Marie Straub’s personal and pastoral AN HEIR (UN HÉRITIER, France, 22 min., in French with English subtitles) uses excerpts from a novel by Maurice Barrès to revisit his own painful memories of growing up in German-occupied Alsace.

In TO THE DEVIL (France, 45 min., in French with English subtitles), Claire Denis takes the leading actor of her next film to meet the real-life model for his character, a renegade living on a remote stretch of the Lawa River between Surinam and French Guyana.

The highlight of the triptych is José Luis Guerín’s MEMORIES OF A MORNING (RECUERDOS DE UNA MAÑANA, Spain, 45 min., in Spanish with English subtitles). Utilizing the impressionistic techniques of IN THE CITY OF SYLVIA (if SYLVIA was a riff on the “city film,” the more miniaturized MEMORIES might be termed a “street-corner film”), Guerín uses a disturbing incident in his Barcelona neighborhood to thread together a rich tapestry on music, culture, community, the fragility of life, and the tenacity of life. HDCAM videos courtesy of the Jeonju International Film Festival. (MR)